OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said processing polite words like “please” and “thank you” is costing the company additional “tens of millions of dollars.” About this informs Futurism.
While communicating with chatbots in a polite manner may seem pointless, some AI experts consider it a useful practice. In particular, Microsoft design manager Curtis Beavers points out that following etiquette “helps generate more useful results.”
According to a survey conducted at the end of 2024, 67% of respondents in the US said that they interact with chatbots politely. Among them, 55% explained it by the fact that it is “so right”, and 12% – by the desire to calm the algorithm in case of an AI uprising. Although experts say that a real revolution in artificial intelligence is still a long way off, this kind of user behavior is already having real environmental consequences.
An investigation by the Washington Post, along with researchers from the University of California, studied the energy consumption of creating a 100-word e-mail. It turned out that 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity is spent on its generation – this is enough to power 14 LED lamps for an hour. If you create one sheet per week for a year, the consumption will be already 7.5 kWh.
Data centers that power chatbots currently consume about 2% of global energy, and this share continues to grow.
